If you believe a 128gb machine that is essentially DGX Spark in a laptop chassis can run models comparable to SOTA you either never ran open models on hard tasks, or you aren't scratching the surface of SOTA closed LLM capability in how you're using them.
Can you show me an example of a hard task that can't be achieved using light models? When we don't want the model to work on autopilot without reviewing the code at all. Even SOTA models will produce garbage code, if you don't guide them all the time.
Hard tasks require a lot of guidance and code reviewing, unless you are creating another throw away project where correctness, maintainability and code understanding does not matter.